Casualty Count

TWO roadside bombs that exploded within a few minutes of each other in central Baghdad overnight killed five people and wounded 18 others, police said. A police spokesman said the successive blasts occurred in a shopping area in the Karrada district...

Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers...

Iraq and China are close to re-signing a $1.2 billion oil deal that was called off after the 2003 U.S. invasion, an Iraqi Oil Ministry official said Thursday.

U.S. troop morale improved in Iraq last year, but soldiers fighting in Afghanistan suffered more depression as violence there worsened, an Army mental health report says.

The state of Iraqi women has become a "national crisis" since the March 2003 US-led invasion, a report released by an international women's group said on Thursday.

U.S. and Iraqi forces killed 11 suspected insurgents and detained 44 others in raids targeting al-Qaida in central and northern Iraq, the U.S. military said Thursday. Three Iraqi troops were killed in one of the operations.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani will travel to Ankara Friday for a two-day visit, a week after Turkish forces ended a military offensive against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, officials said Thursday.

Two people were killed and 10 wounded in clashes between al Qaeda and villagers in Tal Asswad near Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, on Wednesday, police said.

A woman who says co-workers raped her while she was a contractor in Iraq should have her case tried in court, not settled in private arbitration, her lawyer told a federal judge Wednesday.

Staff Sgt. Christopher S. Frost, 24, of Waukesha, Wis., died March 3 near Bayji, Iraq in a crash of an Iraqi Army Mi-17 helicopter. He was assigned to the 377th Air Base Wing, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.

The Iraqi government is refusing to execute the Saddam Hussein henchman and cousin known as "Chemical Ali" unless the death sentences of two other Saddam-era officials also are approved.

The United States may be forced to halt planned troop withdrawals...Major-General Mark Hertling, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, said both central and regional authorities had to take action if hard-won security gains were not to be reversed.

The Iraqi Sadr bloc, which has the backing of 32 members in a 275-seat Iraqi parliament expressed concern about Iraqi presidential council decision to object to a national reconciliation law.

A KURDISH academic who served as Iraqi labour minister in the 1970s was gunned down near the disputed northern oil city of Kirkuk last night, police said.

One of the main Sunni Arab parties in Iraq has criticised the collapse of a trial of two former senior officials accused of aiding Shia death squads. The Iraqi Islamic Party said the government had failed in its duty to protect potential witnesses.

Turkish military helicopters attacked Kurdish separatist rebels in northern Iraq less than a week after the end of a large-scale ground operation, a Turkish television station reported Wednesday.

An Army captain survived a six month tour of Iraq unscathed only to have his leg torn off attempting the famous Cresta Run in Switzerland. Captain Bernie Bambury, 32, lost his right leg below the knee after he hit a marker post at a speed...

Many war-weary veterans of the Iraq War take kindly to the animals they meet abroad — some of them have even gone to great expense and trouble to bring dogs back home with them at the end of their tours of duty.

A roadside bomb killed one person and wounded three others near Mahmudiya, 30 km (20 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

An Iraqi woman and child were killed when a house was struck by what the British military said may have been a defective flare, police and medical officials told AFP on Wednesday.